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Chapter 4 defends a Kantian version of a reconciliation theory of atonement for moral guilt. Reconciliation is a matter of repairing the relationships that constitute a moral community. A theory of atonement built on this ideal attends to all of the parties who are negatively affected by wrongdoing: victims, communities, and wrongdoers themselves. By highlighting the damage done to relationships, we are encouraged to notice the varied kinds of harms that wrongdoing causes — from material harms, to sullied reputations, to the creation of fear and self-hatred — and to consider what can heal those wounds. This chapter articulates the goal of moral reconciliation and examines the means to achieving that goal, including apology, the moral emotions, empathy, and reparations.

Can the reconciliation theory of atonement be applied to cases of group wrongdoing, including instances of historical injustice? Reconciliation is surely valuable in cases like these. Communities that have been ripped apart by ethnic violence, scandal, or political oppression need healing and a restoration of trust. But can we defend the claims of responsibility that seem to be necessary in order to attribute to groups an obligation to atone? This chapter argues that the reconciliation theory of atonement coheres with attributions of collective responsibility in a way that lends credibility to both views. This chapter returns to the case of the Magdalen asylums of Ireland and views it as a case of institutional abuse that calls for group atonement by the Roman Catholic Church. The role of both apology and reparations is discussed.

This chapter begins the examination of the Stoics’ thesis that virtuous activity is sufficient for happiness, starting with its origins in several of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. It argues that Socrates’ argument for the sufficiency of virtue for happiness is best understood as the Stoics understood it, viz. relying on a “formalized” conception of activity as the exercise of choice within circumstances from which the self is always distinct. Other interpretations of Socrates’ position are considered and rejected.

Whom may we forgive? A number of people have argued that only those who are sufficiently apologetic may be forgiven. This chapter considers three of the main arguments offered against forgiving the unapologetic, which are that it condones wrongdoing, expresses a lack of self-respect, or leads to bad consequences. Each of these arguments is found wanting. Along the way the analysis sheds light on the relationship between forgiveness and apology, trust, reconciliation, condonation, self-respect, and punishment.

This chapter offers a typology of public apologies and argues that these new forms that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century can tell us something about the nature of “publicity” in such public moral acts. After categorizing and giving examples of six forms of such public apologies—those offered by celebrities, those offered by corporations, those offered by diplomats, those offered by regimes, those offered in courts, and those offered for historical atrocities—the chapter ends by considering what it is that these public apologies can mean and what they can reveal about the most recent evolutionary transformation of the moral practice of apologizing.

This chapter introduces the concept of apology by looking at how the range of different apologetic acts can be delineated or categorized. It examines how contemporary writers have proposed different ways to do so, and then proposes its own model of distinguishing between private and public apologies. It then examines two films—the American Unforgiven and the German The Lives of Others—to demonstrate how moral worlds that structure what it means to apologize and to forgive are formed through particular kinds of mythologizing and demythologizing. The two films represent exemplary kinds of social orders—the vigilante West, a totalitarian state—that can promote or foreclose the kind of moral world where such exchanges can be meaningful.

This chapter concentrates on the fear of the unknown as the main deterrent to contemplating the abolition of moral responsibility. For a very long time, man has been invariably attached to the system of moral responsibility that they have developed a fear of a world existing without the practices and institutions of moral responsibility. In discussing these fears, this chapter hopes to alleviate them and show that it is possible to conceive of a world without moral responsibility. In many respects, such a world would not be so different; certainly not as disastrously different as many have supposed. It is still possible to make free choices, moral judgments, and sincere apologies; also, self-respect and sense of individual worth could still be retained in such a world. Smilansky, on the other hand, argues otherwise, claiming that man could not be worthy of self-respect if they were not the center of the universe or if they ceased to be special beings.

This chapter explores two matters only briefly touched on in earlier work: for purposes of clarity, in her “Manipulativeness,” Baron took a stand on whether manipulation requires intent and whether “manipulative” is best understood as allowing for the possibility that the quality or action described as manipulative is unobjectionable. This chapter revisits both issues, and explores in more detail what it means to say that manipulation requires intent. It argues that manipulation does require intent (though the intent need not be conscious); laying out and discussing various positions one might take on the moral status of manipulation, the chapter explores the possibility that (contrary to what appears in “Manipulativeness”) “manipulative” is not best understood as a moralized term and that manipulating another person is sometimes morally unobjectionable.

Attributionists believe that moral responsibility has mainly to do with how a person is, and with what can be attributed to her for the purposes of moral assessment. Critics of the view have tended to charge that it proposes a standard for blameworthiness that is too easily satisfied. This chapter defends Attributionism from an opposing criticism—one that notes that many agents who are judged blameworthy by common-sense morality do not fulfill the necessary conditions on blameworthiness that Attributionism proposes. In this context, the chapter pays particular attention to cases in which agents commit apparently blameworthy unwitting omissions. It argues that such agents are often not blameworthy and offers an explanation as to why common-sense morality delivers a contrary judgment.

As chs. 5 to 7 show, epistemic uncertainty about who committed which wrong against whom, scarcity of resources, and the sheer number of perpetrators and victims make it very hard, and indeed undesirable, to try and implement a just peace simpliciter. The fact that so many wrongs go unaddressed and so many needs go unmet is likely to deepen the feelings of anger and hatred which the war itself aroused on all sides; this in turn is likely to undermine (imperfect) restitutive, reparative, and punitive processes, and to lead to war again. This chapter examines and defends the view that reconciliatory practices are well suited to foster mutual trust amongst enemies. Such practices include, non-exhaustively, truths and reconciliation commissions; traditional justice fora such as Rwandese gacaca, and the offering of official apologies for war crimes.

This chapter argues that the sequence of moral practices that follow in the wake of an injury—resentment at injury, apology for injury, and forgiveness of injury—can be best understood in a work that treats all three practices as an ensemble. It also argues that we can appreciate the contemporary debates over these practices by identifying important historical moments in each of their evolutions and discerning what those moments reveal about the practice in question. Instead of attempting to define the practices by identifying what are the restrictive conditions it must meet, philosophers might examine the historical development of each practice and see what dialectic tensions were in place in a key moment of contestation about its meaning.

This chapter discusses two philosophical approaches to understanding the dynamics and work of private apologies: either as performative speech acts or as remedial exchanges. Drawing on the writings of J. L. Austin, an ordinary language philosopher, and Erving Goffman, a sociologist, this chapter examines the different ways of conceiving of apology as an illocutionary act, that is, an utterance that performs an action, or as a rehabilitative ritual, involving bodily gestures and facial expressions in addition to the utterance itself. It then explores how these theories from the 1950s and 1960s can shed light on contemporary writers on apology who wish more dogmatically to identify the categorical features of an apology.

This chapter sums up what the three moral practices of resentment, apology, and forgiveness have come to represent in the modern age, given what issues were most contentious in their moments of origin and evolution. Forgiveness, at the dawn of the Christian era, went from being a form of divine absolution to a strategy for interpersonal reconciliation, resentment at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries from being an individual property inspiring justice to a collective malaise of cultural spite, and apology at the end of World War II from being an essentially private to a manifestly public act. The chapter focuses in particular on the question of how the public–private division can explain the dynamics of these practices in different spheres of interpersonal and collective life.

This chapter explores the nature of remorse, its relation to religion, the role it plays in the assessment of moral character, and the role that such a character assessment might play in decisions to grant legal mercy—in particular, decisions of judges at the time of sentencing or decisions of executives with the power to grant clemency. The complex relationship that acts of apology bear to the kind of remorse that, at least in the minds of many, makes a criminal a legitimate candidate for legal mercy is also examined. The author, exploring both moral and epistemic issues, will express considerable skepticism toward relying on judgments about offender remorse at the time of sentencing, but less skepticism about relying on such judgments at the time of an executive decision to grant clemency.